Today one of my best friends came over for a chat, dinner and kayaking.
As always we had some great conversations, on all sorts of topics. One of the best was about faith; how we view God and how humanity has seen God during different time periods. As we often do we spinned off to another topic and started to discuss religion. Linnea pointed out how things we often give importance to in church, rules etc. can be very far from Jesus's message of God as love. Weren't we supposed to be a loving group of people, after all?

I tried to explain why I think that rules can be someting good. They can help us to get closer to God when one part of us would rather follow our selfish desires, which is great! Furthermore the rules and traditions we have are often created by people who loved God and pursued to love Him more. Off course that is not always the case...
Rules can become a way to justify ourselves before God and resist his grace and love by declaring them unnecessary, just like the pharisees did.

This tension, between God's grace and how a faith has to have deeds to be alive, is something that I struggle with a lot. I'm naturally inclined to want to perform and achieve things. Therefore I often fall into the trap of trying to earn God's love and approval, Furthermore I'm attracted to prestige, which gives me a desire to be a "good and proper" christian. This produces behaviour that reassembles the behaviour of the pharisees, something that causes me quite a lot of grief. On one hand I know that more than anything I want to be the person God created me to be. I desire to be the loving, compassionate Hanna who cares more about others than how she is viewed or how she sees herself. But at the same time I can feel the urge to be super successful super christian Hanna, who tends to be rather elitistic and nasty. And even though I know I'm more like the loving Hanna now than a couple of years ago, I still struggle to let go of the super version of me.

I drove Linnea to Eskilstuna and as I drove back home again, I started to think about these things and got rather depressed. Super me wondered how I would ever become the person that God planned for me to be. So it was very, very nice when I opened my bible and read the passage for the day, from 1 Cor 15:42-44, (the message)

This image of planting a dead seed and raising a live plant is a mere sketch at best, but perhaps it will help in approaching the mystery of the resurrection body—but only if you keep in mind that when we're raised, we're raised for good, alive forever! The corpse that's planted is no beauty, but when it's raised, it's glorious. Put in the ground weak, it comes up powerful. The seed sown is natural; the seed grown is supernatural—same seed, same body, but what a difference from when it goes down in physical mortality to when it is raised up in spiritual immortality!

I know this passage is about the resurrection, but what struck me is how it is God's reedeming grace, through Jesus' sacrifice, that recreates us. Even though I'm weak and just a little seedling I can become a powerful plant (perhaps even a tree ^^).God reminded me how He has always been the one acting in my life, moving me in the direction of Him and shaping me into myself, the self I'm supposed to be. It's with and through Him! As you understand I felt encouraged and less guiltridden. When we allow God's grace into our lives it is easier to surrender our plans of earning his love and approval. The part of me that want to make it on my own according to my own wishes dies, but in that death there is a chance too grow into all that I can be in Jesus. Life to the fullest, one of those mysterious parodoxes of Kingdom life and God.

On the picture below there is a birch, which is my favourite tree. The seeds are really small and annoying but ones they start to grow they are beautiful, as you can see: